Mr. President:A Billionaire & Virgin Fake Fiance Romance(214)

She steps back and motions for me to step inside, but still hasn't said a word. This should be an interesting dinner.

I walk inside and look around the place. It's not bad. Lorna has an eye  for decorating, and there's certainly a level of opulence. I'll give her  that, but that's the only good thing you'll ever hear me say about that  fucking woman.

"Welcome, Mason," Lorna says. There's a chill to her voice. Instead of  her normal pantsuit attire, she's wearing a black dress that ends well  above the knee and a pair of 5-inch black heels. "Please, have a seat."  She waves her hand toward the dining room.

She walks over to the long dining room table and motions for me to sit  in a chair adjacent to her own, which makes me feel like I'm trapped in a  real-world game of chess where she's the queen capable of any move, and  I'm just one of her pawns.

If you think that somehow sounds exciting, you're wrong, Gorgeous.

"I'd like to introduce you to my daughter, Becca," Lorna says. I try to  stifle my surprise. What the fuck? This is Lorna's daughter? Given our  impending marriage, will this now make Becca my stepdaughter? If that's  true, then I've fucked my own stepdaughter and the thought of that  throws my brain for a loop.

"A Pancetta crisp, sir?" her butler asks me, breaking my train of  thought. I smile and nod, and take one. I place it in my mouth and  realize it's better than what I was expecting-sweet, salty, and crisp,  like bacon, but better, and it's topped with goat cheese and pears, and  the sweetness cuts through the salt in all the right ways.

Maybe dinner won't be entirely bad. At least I'll get a good meal out of it.

The butler comes back and begins pouring me a glass of bubbly Chenin  Blanc, and when I take a sip, the crackly carbonation matches the crisp  Pancetta in a way that makes me smile despite the fact that I'm sitting  next to a snake thinly-disguised as a woman in a skin-tight black dress.

"Now that we're all here, I'd like to make an announcement," Lorna says,  tapping her wine glass with the edge of her silver spoon making a  tinkling sound that breaks our silence. Becca and I both look up. I'm  dreading what's about to tumble out of her mouth. It could fucking be  anything.

She continues, "Mason and I have gotten engaged."

The sound of someone choking comes from across the table and I see that  Becca is having a hard time swallowing her dinner roll. I wonder if I'm  gonna have to perform CPR, but she recovers by gulping down her entire  glass of wine.

I can tell she's trying hard to contain her surprise, but she's clearly  floored by this news. The same thought that crept into my mind has now  probably made it into hers.

"You are full of surprises mother," she says. "Shall I say  congratulations, or would that be too soon? Maybe I should wait and see  if this marriage lasts longer than all the ones before it?"

Lorna bristles at her comment. "Instead of being a bitch, I think you should try and show your mother a little respect."

"Respect?" Becca asks. "Is that what you call this? That's hilarious."

"Careful, Becca. I'd hold that tongue of yours," Lorna says, and her  chilly words bring a renewed silence. The kind of deep silence that  accompanies a winter storm.

I don't know what's going on between these two, but I'd say they don't  have the healthiest of relationships. But can anyone really have a  healthy relationship with this devil in disguise? Even I know that  anyone who gets close to this bitch gets burned. Just look at what  happened to her father.

Their butler, Carl, enters the dining room again, this time bringing us  plates of steak. I eagerly cut into it with my knife and see right away  that it's a "black and blue" steak, which seems to sum up the way my  bruised confidence is feeling right now. It's seared on the  outside-almost burned really-but when I drag my knife through it, I see a  mixture of blue and red on the inside, and I don't just mean a little  rare, but fucking raw. It's blue and bloody, and while I rarely shy away  from a good, thick steak, I'm not sure I can stomach this one.

Don't give me that look Gorgeous. You think true meat connoisseurs  should enjoy their steaks raw? Well, have you ever eaten a "black and  blue" steak? It's a fucking obscene and violent way to eat a slab of  meat, and in my opinion, it's a fucking red flag when it comes to sexual  partners, and maybe that's why Lorna chose it. Mark my words. Run for  the hills.

The problem for me is that even though every fucking alarm bell is going  off in my brain, I can't run for the hills. I'm fucking stuck.

I find myself pushing pieces of the steak around my plate when Lorna's cell phone starts vibrating.

"Excuse me, dear," she says, placing her hand on top of mine as she  pushes her chair back from the table. "I need to take this call."

Dear? That word from her mouth makes my stomach lurch even more than it already is.

As soon as she's gone, Becca turns to me and says, "You're an asshole.  You could've told me. You could've given me some sort of a heads up that  a freight train of fucked up news was going to plow into me."

"It's not what you think," I say.

"Is that so? It all looks pretty obvious to me. Do you get off on  'stepdad-stepdaughter' role-playing or something? Is that why you fucked  me? Or maybe that isn't it. Are you after my mother's wealth or  something? I'm just trying to wrap my head around all of this," she  says. "What's in it for you?"

"Look, slow down. First, I had no idea who you were that day at the  bar," I say. "I had no idea that you were Lorna Lowell's daughter. And  second, I have enough wealth without your mother's. I haven't been  called the King of Wall Street for nothing."

"So what is it then? Are her tits that impressive? Has the head of your  cock swollen so much that your brain has lost all ability to reason?"

This is a side of Becca I've never seen before. I have to say, she looks  kind of hot all riled up like this. This girl has spunk.

"None of the above," I reply. "This has to do with my position with the board."

"What's that supposed to mean?" she asks, tucking her blonde hair behind one ear.

I'm really not in the mood to re-count the whole story to Becca, but I  figure this may be my only opportunity. I need to set the record  straight.

"Your mother owns a large stake in my company, Kane Price," I say. "So  large that according to company bylaws, I had to give her a seat on the  Board of Directors. And she's now in the role of Chief Counsel advising  all investment matters."

"But I still don't understand," Becca says. "Why would you have to go and marry her? Where's the connection?"

"She basically held my hand to the flame."

Becca laughs. "Give me a break. You're a grown man. Why wouldn't you just say no?"

"It's not that simple," I say, "and if you've watched the news at all,  you'd see I recently got myself in a bit of a fucking mess."

"That's putting it mildly," she replies.

"She threatened me. If I didn't agree to marry her, she'd not only bring  me down, but the entire company as well. You may not believe me, but I  actually give a shit about the thousands of Kane Price employees. Their  livelihood is at stake, just as much as mine is."

"Well, I'm still pissed you didn't tell me," Becca says.

"It wasn't my choice," I reply. "That night, I had no way of predicting this."         

     



 

I can see by the look in Becca's eyes that she still doesn't believe me,  but it's too late to convince her any further because I hear Lorna  enter the dining room.

"What wasn't your choice?" she asks, her voice sharper than my steak knife.

Fuck my life.

I need to pull something out of my ass to placate her and smooth things over. This should be interesting.





169





Becca





I watch as Mason tries to cover his tracks with my uber bitch of a mother.

"I was talking about this steak," he says casually. "Becca asked how I  could possibly eat my steak this rare, and I just said it wasn't my  choice."

Mason looks at me, his eyes pleading with me to play along.

I agree to smooth the situation over with him and jump in with the lie.  "Yeah, I half expect it to start mooing again at any moment."

"Grow up, Becca," Lorna says.

If that's the harshest thing she's got for me, I can live with that, so I  let it go. What I can't live with is the fact that Mason consented to  marry my mother. This feels like one big joke, where a camera crew is  going to jump out from the kitchen and say, "Surprise! You've just been a  part of one giant prank!"

But of course, I know it's far more serious than that. Still, how could  he have agreed to the marriage after what we went through-rescuing me  from Robert at the bar, the obnoxious banker who thought he was God's  gift to women, and then of course what later happened in the bathroom  stall …  even he has to remember that.

I watch as Mason turns on the charm for my mother. He's completely  ignoring me at this point. H's smiling a little wider, and his body is  turned in her direction.